anniemiz

My buddy's new blog...

...is here.  Go ahead on over and give her a hard time...just don't call her 'meaty'.

Sockington

Heh.  Fans of cats and/or silliness (sp?) will enjoy the newest twitter celeb, Sockington the cat.  There's also a Sockington facebook page.  A 'publicity photo' from his facebook page:

 

Apparently, Sockington's twitter feed was highlighted by twitter as a feed to follow and before he knew it he was shooting for at least 500,000 twitter followers (as of now, he has 550,298).  That's pretty much his claim to fame.

HIs twitter style has been described (somewhere, I can't remember where) as 'free jazz prose' and that sounds about right.  He twits in alternating caps and lower case which adds something, though I can't quite put my finger on it, to his twits.  E.g.:

OH SURELY WE CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS I have pondered the issue and have decided I am capable of 5-10 times more meals READY FOR EXPERIMENT

FIVE YEARS AGO MOM SAID GO WAIT BY SUBWAY STOP AND GET FREE FOOD mom was right thanks mom

lick lick lick OH DELICIOUS PAWS you are like four little journals of voyages past and floors well met

My personal current fave:

sniff sniff sniff sniff THESE ARE THE MOST UNINFORMATIVE PANTS I'VE DEALT WITH IN A WHILE you washed them didn't you REVISIONIST

*snicker*

Uh oh!  Running out of time and battery!

oink

Cute Overload has found the swine flu's Patient Zero!

Patient Zero

by Meg on April 30, 2009

A-HA!

Happy Birthday, Mr. Flapper Duck!

Today is Mr. Flapper Duck's 5th birthday.  Mr. Flapper Duck is...you guessed it...a duck.  Somehow I stumbled upon his blog and let me tell you I have learned soooo much about ducks!  First and foremost, they are a lot of work.  I had no idea that ducks reach full size in just 5 weeks and that they can live 10-20 years!

So head on over to his blog, read about Flapper and his fellow ducks, his peeps, his new aviary and, if that's not enough duck for you, there's Flapper-Cam!

Here's a portrait of the duck as a young duck (all pix are from Flapper's website):

And here's the handsome fellow today:

 

Listen, I don't know much about ducks, but I know for An Indisputable Fact that Flapper is one good looking duck (and what beautiful pictures Tiffany [his person] takes).  Happy birthday, big guy!  Quack on!

The oft-overlooked, lesser known miracle of Easter

 

Mmm Mmm Monday: Brownies

Today's an easy Mmm Mmm Monday for me bc I'm just going to link to this brownie recipe on Darling Millie's mom's cooking blog, Cooks with Love.

They're in the oven right now...pictures to follow!

Crash Dummy

Sorry about the lack of posts lately.  I actually had stuff to post, but my puter's hard drive crashed.  I'm typing on Kevin's pc now, which is okay, but it's not my pc.  I've only had the thing for about 6 months or so now.  I was losing internet access occasionally and got some message about McAfee anti-spam.  McAfee took me through a patch...a few times, assuring me each time that it would fix the problem.  And then all of a sudden I couldn't scare up anything beyond a black screen and a cursor.

So I did the online chat with Dell (on Kevin's pc bc mine was useless)...btw, chat is so much better than trying to do it over the phone...and they had me run some diagnostic thingie on my pc...which found that my hard drive is dead.  I mentioned the problem w/losing internet access and the guy thinks I had some spyware/malware.  Gross.  He issued all the usual warnings about opening attachments, visiting specious websites, etc.  I'm usually pretty good about that stuff bc a) I try to stay out of the bowels of the internet; and b) I'm lazy in that I can't be bothered to open up most attachments sent in emails. 

I actually wonder if the problem has anything to do with the fact that Miles likes to sit/sleep on the keyboard.  Several times I've found him hanging out there, looking all innocent while the screen shows all kinds of activity going on.  He's opened up all manner of programs, started things, stopped things, closed things....  I didn't mention it to the Dell guy bc I don't know if cat vandalism is covered under warranty.

They sent out a new hard drive which I will try to replace today since it's a SNOW !!1! DAY at work.  I luuuurrrve snow days.  I have a feeling that I appreciate snow days off of work now even more than snow days off of school as a kid.  I think I do; this job thing can suck the lifeblood out of a person.  I'm trying to let it get less of my blood than I have in previous jobs.  I remember worrying so much about work when I was at places like Coopers & Lybrand and Deloitte & Touche.  What a waste of time and energy.  Not that the work wasn't worthwhile to somebody; it was certainly honest work; it just wasn't worthwhile to me and yet I got soooo into it.  I let myself get sooooo into it (which would've been fine it it were worth it to me, but it wasn't).  Now I try to keep a healthy distance between work and non-work.  It is a bit easier to do this since working at the library.  I've always loved the library, books, reading, chatting, etc.   And it's a much mellower environment there.  The interpersonal relationships are much better.  I think it's possible to have better relationships there bc there's no (as far as I can see) competitive element.  I mean, what would we compete for/about?  It's a small library...everyone that works there lives in town or maybe one town over.  You get to know a lot of the patrons there, which I like.  I really like chatting with people when they come in.  It's fun...you can learn a lot just from chatting with people...some aren't into it and that's okay...but most seem to be into it.

Well, there are a few less-than-pleasant patrons.  I understand that all libraries have a certain amount of special needs patrons, where 'special needs' can mean a variety of things.  We have a few group homes in town; I think they're mostly for psychologically-challenged people.  While I understand that they have issues over which they have no control, it doesn't change the fact that their behavior can be a bit disconcerting at times, e.g., when they flip out right in front of you.  One of our newer such patrons gets on these kicks where he Googles the stuffing out of some topic.  Right now, it's religious stuff.  One day he absolutely needed to find this picture he had seen on the internet: a bridge with trees all around it. 'mkay.  Apparently, he had seen this article on Roe v. Wade at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops website at some point in his life.   At the end of the article there's a picture ad for the conference's publishing company: a picture of a bridge with trees around it.  The text reads, 'Modern Questions, Gospel Answers'.  And he wanted those gospel answers something fierce.  He thought that if you click on that picture, you will get the gospel answers to all your modern questions.  Were it that easy, my friend.  That's actually not a weird thing for a psych-challenged person to think, especially since he has close to zero internet skills.  Unfortunately, I don't think I convinced him that a) it's just an ad; b) there's nothing 'behind' it; c) there's nothing to click on there; and, most difficult of all, d) the gospel answers aren't out there, i.e., the bishops might say one thing about abortion; other groups might say something else about it; and he has to figure out for himself what he thinks about it; this last bit did not go over well.  I got the feeling he thought I was lying to him.  So yes, I believe I failed that patron that day.

One guy has flipped out on us several times in the last few days...and he's allegedly not challenged in any way, except perhaps wrt anger management, but that's just my layperson's diagnosis.  He's lost documents...that he couldn't possibly recreate...that are so important...that he worked so hard on...for so long...an hour for two pages!...yet he didn't save them anywhere.  The director finally gave him a flash drive bc it's happened several times and somehow it's our fault.  He still isn't using the flash drive and it's still our fault.  Whatevs, dude.

Anyhoo...I have only myself to blame that I lost stuff when my hard drive died bc I failed to back up anything.  I hadn't acquired much on this pc...I'm mostly bummed about pictures I lost, most notably a picture of Stephanie drinking wine from the bottle through a straw.  But, as others have pointed out, there will most likely be many opportunities to recreate that particular scene.  Happy thought, that.

So, anyway, that's the deal here.  I have a backlog of stuff to post: Mmm Mmm Monday recipes; Thursday Thrift ideas; Friday Cat Blogging (but of course); movie reviews (we continue to work our way down the AFI top 100 films, as well as tossing in a few others...'Triumph of the Will' anyone?...I don't know what possessed me to watch that); and what would a blog be without a healthy dose of navel-gazing by the blogger?

I Should Get Extra Credit for This

Or something.  Sometimes I check my stats to see what brings people here.  Turns out that yours truly, who recently decided to stop pursuing a big ol' philosophy MA and PhD, is either #1 or at least on the front page of Google searches for Smart's Sensation and Brain Processes and Armstrong's The Causal Theory of Mind, or variations on those search items.  Not that turning up on Google means anything; and I'm pretty sure that those entries were just to explain things to myself and who knows what I got right and what I got wrong.  It just seems kinda funny to me that my philosophy studies live on, at least in Google.  I do wonder how many undergrads writing papers out there plagiarize those posts versus how many use them correctly and honestly.

And would you believe that there is not a single cheezburger cat relevant to philosophy?  How could this be?!?  Shameful.

Oops

FYI, some comments were accidentally deleted.  I got a little carried away and careless deleting some spamular comments and mistakenly deleted real comments.  It's nothing personal!

Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom

I love cheezburger cats.  Besides the captions, they have some great pictures of cats doing catty things.  Love the claws on this guy.  And that fang!